Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2023 Update)
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301. “Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.”

— George Orwell

302. “Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase in pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop.”

— George Orwell

303. “We make you pay for the water you drink, for the food you eat, for the wars we need, for the crimes we commit. We make you dedicate the most important part of your life to us, but we give you wages and tell you they allow you to buy stuff and pay for your needs to make us richer. We call this freedom.”

— George Orwell

304. “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”

— George Orwell

305. “Sentimental, you say? Anti-social? Oughtn’t to prefer trees to men? I say it depends what trees and what men.”

— George Orwell

306. “Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.”

— George Orwell

307. “To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.”

— George Orwell

308. “If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”

— George Orwell

309. “All nationalistic distinctions – all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect – are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them.”

— George Orwell

310. “Writing a novel is agony.”

— George Orwell

311. “We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.”

— George Orwell

312. “Four legs good, two legs bad.’ This, he said, contained the essential principle of Animalism.”

— George Orwell

313. “One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense over sensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting.”

— George Orwell

314. “Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is WORK? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course – but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless.”

— George Orwell

315. “I’m fat, but I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?”

— George Orwell

316. “He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend.”

— George Orwell

317. “A peace that is truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.”

— George Orwell

318. “It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith-as mysterious as faith itself. Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted in logic; it is a change in the climate of the mind.”

— George Orwell

319. “Can you not understand that liberty is worth more than just ribbons?”

— George Orwell

320. “After 40, a man is responsible for his face.”

— George Orwell

321. “There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word – Man.”

— George Orwell

322. “Four legs good, two legs better! Four legs good, two legs better! Four legs good, two legs better!” It went on for five minutes without stopping. And by the time the sheep had quieted down, the chance to utter any protest had passed, for the pigs had marched back into the farmhouse.”

— George Orwell

323. “He said that the education of the young was more important than anything that could be done for those who are already grown up.”

— George Orwell

324. “On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”

— George Orwell

325. “Football, a game in which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners.”

— George Orwell

326. “The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.”

— George Orwell

327. “In Newspeak there is no word for ‘Science’. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc.”

— George Orwell

328. “When I see a policeman with a club beating a man on the ground, I don’t have to ask whose side I’m on.”

— George Orwell

329. “When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist – after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct.”

— George Orwell

330. “Truth becomes untruth if uttered by your enemy.”

— George Orwell

331. “It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.”

— George Orwell

332. “What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralised government.”

— George Orwell

333. “Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.”

— George Orwell

334. “The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.”

— George Orwell

335. “Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”

— George Orwell

336. “To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.”

— George Orwell

337. “What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked upon as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty becasue they have no intellect.”

— George Orwell

338. “The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.”

— George Orwell

339. “Cricket is a game full or forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic changes of fortune and its rules are so ill-defined that their interpretation is partly an ethical business.”

— George Orwell

340. “The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.”

— George Orwell

341. “And it is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots.”

— George Orwell

342. “Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.”

— George Orwell

343. “If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.”

— George Orwell

344. “The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.”

— George Orwell

345. “By preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.”

— George Orwell

346. “By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.”

— George Orwell

347. “Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.”

— George Orwell

348. “Always yell with the crowd, that’s what I say. It’s the only way to be safe.”

— George Orwell

349. “Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.”

— George Orwell

350. “What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.”

— George Orwell